Those are the top 12 indestructible careers and their median annual salaries, according to a Career Builder article recently published on CNN. The first thing I need to get off my chest is… I hope in my lifetime the media will start referring to me as something other than a mortician. I despise that term. It brings to mind the picture of Lurch on the Addam’s Family when he would answer the phone and say, “You rang.” Funeral Director, Funeral Service Provider, Mortuary Science Practitioner…. there are plenty of other terms.

Now back to the article. Two items are troubling to me; who is missing from the list, and how little money the people are making in our supposed indestructible careers. Waste disposal mangers? Really? We need them more than nurses? Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad that someone gets up in the morning and wants to manage and relocate my trash. But do I need that more than a nurse?

And a tax collector? Maybe if more people had a financial planner and a CPA we wouldn’t need so many tax collectors. And listing a barber makes about as much sense as adding tire store workers…after all most people own a car and need 4 tires.

So what about these horrible salaries? How can the workers in these careers make such little money if their jobs are so indestructible and the people are so needed? For some reason our society thinks that the people they need the most, they also have the right to have provided for them. How else do you explain the salary of the teacher? We don’t want to pay for what we think we are already owed.

I’ll be following this list of the most indestructible careers in the years to come. Teachers, doctors, and soldiers will always make the list, and rightly so, but in the years to come the number of those careers and their ties to our aging population will surely start to knock off the waste disposal mangers, barbers, etc.

As a funeral director and college instructor earning continuing education credit each year to maintain my certification, I can honestly write that I have been through some horribly long presentations, while listening to boring speakers trying to educate me on irrelevant topics. Thankfully though, I have also listened to dynamic speakers, with fascinating topics, all the while wishing I could get just another hour or two of information on the topic.

The educational units at End of Life Insights are designed to be dynamic, timely, and cover a multitude of topics. You won’t be selecting from the typical OSHA and government regulated issues which everyone offers, or be forced to participate in re-writes of topics you already studied of college. Instead you’ll be going on a virtual visit of the Imperial Tombs of China, may watch a funeral pyre on the Ganges River, or learn about the ancient Mayan afterlife, where the cause of death determined where the soul would reside for eternity. We will also timely topics like mentoring employees to increase retention in high burn out death related fields, and the real risk to those handling radioactive human remains.